Saturday, December 28, 2013

323. Demonstrators are often stupid: they work for their future oppressors.

Prof. James Petras, a life long Marxist if I am correct, does have a lot of correct analyses.Of course I do not agree with his Marxist ideas, but I agree with him that quite often 'the People' are manipulated into demonstrations which do not serve these people, but serve a party that simply wants to take over govenment.They use the dissatisfaction of the masses to topple the old regime, and then take over power.An example which you will not find with Petras is this: The jews used the masses to topple the Tsar, and then took power themselves. The masses were in much bigger trouble than before: in the next 50 years 60 million of them would be killed by their own government. ( R J Rummel) ( B. Russell)Here is Petras's article, unchanged from ICH :

Oligarchs,
Demagogues, and Mass Revolts against DemocracyBy James Petras

December
27, 2013 "Information Clearing House-In
ancient Rome, especially during the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob
violence to block, intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant
faction in the Senate. While neither the ruling or opposing factions
represented the interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or
slaves, the use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of
representative government and the republican form of government laid the
groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers) and the
transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.

Demagogues,
in the pay of aspiring emperors, aroused the passions of a motley array of
disaffected slum dwellers, loafers and petty thieves (ladrones) with promises, pay-offs
and positions in a New Order. Professional mob organizers cultivated their ties
with the oligarchs ‘above’ and with professional demonstrators ‘below’. They
voiced ‘popular grievances’ and articulated demands questioning the legitimacy
of the incumbent rulers, while laying the groundwork for the rule by the few.
Usually, when the pay-master oligarchs came to power on a wave of demagogue-led
mob violence, they quickly suppressed the demonstrations, paid off the
demagogues with patronage jobs in the new regime or resorted to a discrete
assassination for ‘street leaders’ unwilling to recognize the new order’. The
new rulers purged the old Senators into exile, expulsion and dispossession,
rigged new elections and proclaimed themselves ‘saviors of the republic’. They
proceeded to drive peasants from their land, renounce social obligations and
stop food subsidies for poor urban families and funds for public works.

The
use of mob violence and “mass revolts” to serve the interests of oligarchical
and imperial powers against democratically-elected governments has been a
common strategy in recent times.

Throughout
the ages, the choreographed “mass revolt” played many roles: (1) it served to
destabilize an electoral regime; (2) it provided a platform for its oligarch
funders to depose an incumbent regime; (3) it disguised the fact that the
oligarchic opposition had lost democratic elections; (4) it provided a
political minority with a ‘fig-leaf of legitimacy’ when it was otherwise
incapable of acting within a constitutional framework and (5) it allowed for
the illegitimate seizure of power in the name of a pseudo ‘majority’, namely
the “crowds in the central plaza”.

Some
leftist commentators have argued two contradictory positions: One the one hand,
some simply reduce the oligarchy’s power grab to an ‘inter-elite struggle’
which has nothing to do with the ‘interests of the working class’, while others
maintain the ‘masses’ in the street are protesting against an “elitist regime”.
A few even argue that with popular, democratic demands, these revolts are
progressive, should be supported as “terrain for class struggle”. In other
words, the ‘left’ should join the uprising and contest the oligarchs for
leadership within the stage-managed revolts!

What
progressives are unwilling to recognize is that the oligarchs orchestrating the
mass revolt are authoritarians who completely reject democratic procedures and
electoral processes. Their aim is to establish a ‘junta’, which will eliminate
all democratic political and social institutions and freedoms and impose
harsher, more repressive and regressive policies and institutions than those
they replace. Some leftists support the ‘masses in revolt’ simply because of
their ‘militancy’, their numbers and street courage, without examining the
underlying leaders, their interests and links to the elite beneficiaries of a
‘regime change’.

All
the color-coded “mass revolts” in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR featured
popular leaders who exhorted the masses in the name of ‘independence and
democracy’ but were pro-NATO, pro-(Western) imperialists and linked to
neo-liberal elites. Upon the fall of communism, the new oligarchs privatized
and sold off the most lucrative sectors of the economy throwing millions out of
work, dismantled the welfare state and handed over their military bases to NATO
for the stationing of foreign troops and the placement of missiles aimed at
Russia.

The
entire ‘anti-Stalinist’ left in the US and Western Europe, with a few notable
exceptions, celebrated these oligarch-controlled revolts in Eastern Europe and
some even participated as minor accomplices in the post-revolt neo-liberal
regimes. One clear reason for the demise of “Western Marxism” arose from its
inability to distinguish a genuine popular democratic revolt from a mass uprising
funded and stage-managed by rival oligarchs!

One
of the clearest recent example of a manipulated ‘people’s power’ revolution in
the streets to replace an elected representative of one sector of the elite
with an even more brutal, authoritarian ‘president’ occurred in early 2001 in
the Philippines. The more popular and independent (but notoriously corrupt)
President Joseph Estrada, who had challenged sectors of the Philippine elite
and current US foreign policy (infuriating Washington by embracing Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez), was replaced through street demonstrations of middle-class
matrons with soldiers in civvies by Gloria Makapagal-Arroyo. Mrs.
Makapagal-Arroyo, who had close links to the US and the Philippine military,
unleashed a horrific wave of brutality dubbed the ‘death-squad democracy’. The
overthrow of Estrada was actively supported by the left, including sectors of
the revolutionary left, who quickly found themselves the target of an
unprecedented campaign of assassinations, disappearances, torture and
imprisonment by their newly empowered ‘Madame President’.

The
use of mobs and mass uprisings by oligarchs and empire builders has a long and
notorious history. Three of the bloodiest cases, which scarred their societies
for decades, took place in Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, and Chile in 1973.

Democratically-elected
Jacobo Árbenz was the first Guatemalan President to initiate agrarian reform
and legalize trade unions, especially among landless farm workers. Árbenz’s
reforms included the expropriation of unused, fallow land owned by the United
Fruit Company, a giant US agro-business conglomerate. The CIA used its ties to
local oligarchs and right-wing generals and colonels to instigate and finance
mass-protests against a phony ‘communist-takeover’ of Guatemala under President
Arbenz. The military used the manipulated mob violence and the ‘threat’ of
Guatemala becoming a “Soviet satellite”, to stage a bloody coup. The coup leaders
received air support from the CIA and slaughtered thousands of Arbenz
supporters and turned the countryside into ‘killing fields’. For the next 50
years political parties, trade unions and peasant organizations were banned, an
estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered and millions were displaced.

In
1952 Mohammed Mossadegh was elected president of Iran on a moderate nationalist
platform, after the overthrow of the brutal monarch. Mossadegh announced the
nationalization of the petroleum industry. The CIA, with the collaboration of
the local oligarchs, monarchists and demagogues organized ‘anti-communist’
street mobs to stage violent demonstrations providing the pretext for a
monarchist- military coup. The CIA-control Iranian generals brought Shah Reza Pahlavi
back from Switzerland and for the next 26 years Iran was a monarchist-military
dictatorship, whose population was terrorized by the Savak, the murderous
secret police.

The
US oil companies received the richest oil concessions; the Shah joined Israel and
the US in an unholy alliance against progressive nationalist dissidents and
worked hand-in-hand to undermine independent Arab states. Tens of thousands of
Iranians were killed, tortured and driven into exile. In 1979, a mass popular
uprising led by Islamic movements, nationalist and socialist parties and trade
unions drove out the Shah-Savak dictatorship. The Islamists installed a radical
nationalist clerical regime, which retains power to this day despite decades of
a US-CIA-funded destabilization campaign which has funded both terrorist groups
and dissident liberal movements.

Chile
is the best-known case of CIA-financed mob violence leading to a military coup.
In 1970, the democratic socialist Dr. Salvador Allende was elected president of
Chile. Despite CIA efforts to buy votes to block Congressional approval of the
electoral results and its manipulation of violent demonstrations and an
assassination campaign to precipitate a military coup, Allende took office.

During
Allende’s tenure as president the CIA financed a variety of “direct actions”
–from paying the corrupt leaders of a copper workers union to stage strikes and
the truck owners associations to refuse to transport goods to the cities, to
manipulating right-wing terrorist groups like thePatria y
Libertad(Fatherland
and Liberty) in their assassination campaigns. The CIA’s destabilization
program was specifically designed to provoke economic instability through
artificial shortages and rationing, in order to incite middle class discontent.
This was made notorious by the street demonstrations of pot-banging housewives.
The CIA sought to incite a military coup through economic chaos. Thousands of
truck owners were paid not to drive their trucks leading to shortages in the
cities, while right-wing terrorists blew up power stations plunging
neighborhoods into darkness and shop owners who refused to join the ‘strike’
against Allende were vandalized. On September 11, 1973, to the chants of
‘Jakarta’ (in celebration of a 1964 CIA coup in Indonesia), a junta of
US-backed Chilean generals grabbed power from an elected government. Tens of
thousands of activists and government supporters were arrested, killed,
tortured and forced into exile. The dictatorship denationalized and privatized
its mining, banking and manufacturing sectors, following the free market
dictates of Milton Friedman-trained economists (the so-call “Chicago Boys”).
The dictatorship overturned 40 years of welfare, labor and land-reform
legislation which had made Chile the most socially advanced country in Latin
America. With the generals in power, Chile became the ‘neo-liberal model’ for
Latin America. Mob violence and the so-called “middle class revolt”, led to the
consolidation of oligarchic and imperial rule and a 17-year reign of terror under
General Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The whole society was brutalized and
with the return of electoral politics, even former ‘leftist’ parties retained
the dictatorship’s neo-liberal economic policies, its authoritarian
constitution and the military high command. The ‘revolt of the middle class’ in
Chile resulted in the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the
oligarchs in Latin America to this day!

The
Contemporary Use and Abuse of “Mass Revolts”: Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela,
Thailand, and Argentina

In
recent years “mass revolt” has become the instrument of choice when oligarchs,
generals and other empire builders seeking ‘regime change’. By enlisting an
assortment of nationalist demagogues and imperial-funded NGO ‘leaders’, they
set the conditions for the overthrow of democratically elected governments and
stage-managed the installment of their own “free market” regimes with dubious
“democratic” credentials.

Not
all the elected regimes under siege are progressive. Many ‘democracies’, like
the Ukraine, are ruled by one set of oligarchs. In Ukraine, the elite
supporting President Viktor Yanukovich, decided that entering into a deep
client-state relationship with the European Union was not in their interests,
and sought to diversify their international trade partners while maintaining
lucrative ties with Russia. Their opponents, who are currently behind the
street demonstrations in Kiev, advocate a client relationship with the EU,
stationing of NATO troops, and cutting ties with Russia. In Thailand, the
democratically-elected Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, represents a
section of the economic elite with ties and support in the rural areas,
especially the North-East, as well as deep trade relations with China. The
opponents are urban-based, closer to the military-monarchists and favor a
straight neo-liberal agenda linked to the US against the rural
patronage-populist agenda of Ms. Shinawatra.

Egypt’s
democratically-elected Mohamed Morsi government pursued a moderate Islamist
policy with some constraints on the military and a loosening of ties with
Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In terms of the IMF, Morsi
sought compromise. The Morsi regime was in flux when it was overthrown: not
Islamist nor secular, not pro-worker but also not pro-military. Despite all of
its different pressure groups and contradictions, the Morsi regime permitted
labor strikes, demonstrations, opposition parties, freedom of the press and
assembly. All of these democratic freedoms have disappeared after waves of
‘mass street revolts’, choreographed by the military, set the conditions for
the generals to take power and establish their brutal dictatorship – jailing
and torturing tens of thousands and outlawing all opposition parties.

Mass
demonstrations and demagogue-led direct actions also actively target
democratically elected progressive governments, like Venezuela and Argentina,
in addition to the actions against conservative democracies cited above.
Venezuela, under Presidents Hugo Chavez and Vicente Maduro advance an
anti-imperialist, pro-socialist program. ‘Mob revolts’ are combined with waves
of assassinations, sabotage of public utilities, artificial shortages of
essential commodities, vicious media slander and opposition election campaigns
funded from the outside. In 2002, Washington teamed up with its collaborator
politicians, Miami and Caracas-based oligarchs and local armed gangs, to mount
a “protest movement” as the pretext for a planned business-military coup. The
generals and members of the elite seized power and deposed and arrested the
democratically-elected President Chavez. All avenues of democratic expression
and representation were closed and the constitution annulled. In response to
the kidnapping of ‘their president’, over a million Venezuelans spontaneously
mobilized and marched upon the Presidential palace to demand the restoration of
democracy and Hugo Chavez to the presidency. Backed by the large pro-democracy
and pro-constitution sectors of the Venezuelan armed forces, the mass protests
led to the coup’s defeat and the return of Chavez and democracy. All democratic
governments facing manipulated imperial-oligarchic financed mob revolts should
study the example of Venezuela’s defeat of the US-oligarch-generals’ coup. The
best defense for democracy is found in the organization, mobilization and
political education of the electoral majority. It is not enough to participate
in free elections; an educated and politicized majority must also know how to
defend their democracy in the streets as well as at the ballot box.

The
lessons of the 2002 coup-debacle were very slowly absorbed by the Venezuelan
oligarchy and their US patrons who continued to destabilize the economy in an
attempt to undermine democracy and seize power. Between December 2002 and
February 2003, corrupt senior oil executives of the nominally ‘public’ oil
company PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela)
organized a ‘bosses’ lockout stopping production, export and local distribution
of oil and refined petroleum produces. ,Corrupt trade union officials, linked
to the US National Endowment for Democracy, mobilized oil workers and other
employees to support the lock-out, in their attempt to paralyze the economy.
The government responded by mobilizing the other half of the oil workers who,
together with a significant minority of middle management, engineers and
technologists, called on the entire Venezuelan working class to take the oil
fields and installations from the ‘bosses’. To counter the acute shortage of
gasoline, President Chavez secured supplies from neighboring countries and
overseas allies. The lockout was defeated. Several thousand supporters of the
executive power grab were fired and replaced by pro-democracy managers and
workers.

Having
failed to overthrow the democratic government via “mass revolts”, the oligarchs
turned toward a plebiscite on Chavez rule and later called for a nation-wide
electoral boycott, both of which were defeated. These defeats served to
strengthen Venezuela’s democratic institutions and decreased the presence of
opposition legislators in the Congress. The repeated failures of the elite to
grab power led to a new multi-pronged strategy using: (1) US-funded NGO’s to
exploit local grievances and mobilize residents around community issues; (2)
clandestine thugs to sabotage utilities, especially power, assassinate peasant
recipients of land reform titles, as well as prominent officials and activists;
(3) mass electoral campaign marches, and (4) economic destabilization via
financial speculation, illegal foreign exchange trading, price gouging and
hoarding of basic consumer commodities. The purpose of these measures is to
incite mass discontent, using their control of the mass media to provoke
another ‘mass revolt’ to set the stage for another US-backed ‘power grab’.
Violent street protests by middle class students from the elite Central
University were organized by oligarch-financed demagogues. ‘Demonstrations’
included sectors of the middle class and urban poor angered by the artificial
shortages and power outages. The sources of popular discontent were rapidly and
effectively addressed at the top by energetic government measures: business
owners engaged in hoarding and price gouging were jailed; prices of essential
staples were reduced; hoarded goods were seized from warehouses and distributed
to the poor; the import of essential goods were increased and saboteurs were
pursued. The Government’s effective intervention resonated with the mass of the
working class, the lower-middle class and the rural and urban poor and restored
their support. Government supporters took to the streets and lined up at the
ballot box to defeat the campaign of destabilization. The government won a
resounding electoral mandate allowing it to move decisively against the
oligarchs and their backers in Washington.

The
Venezuelan experience shows how energetic government counter-measures can
restore support and deepen progressive social changes for the majority. This is
because forceful progressive government intervention against anti-democratic
oligarchs, combined with the organization, political education and mobilization
of the majority of voters can decisively defeat these stage-managed mass
revolts.

Argentina
is an example of a weakened democratic regime trying to straddle the fence
between the oligarchs and the workers, between the combined force of the
agro-business and mining elites and working and middle class constituencies
dependent on social policies. The elected-Kirchner-Fernandez government has
faced “mass revolts” in the a series of street demonstrations whipped up by
conservative agricultural exporters over taxes; the Buenos Aires upper-middle
class angered at ‘crime, disorder and insecurity’, a nationwide strike by
police officials over ‘salaries’ who ‘looked the other way’ while gangs of
‘lumpen’ street thugs pillaged and destroyed stores. Taken altogether, these
waves of mob action in Argentina appear to be part of a politically-directed
destabilization campaign by the authoritarian Right who have instigated or, at
least, exploited these events. Apart from calling on the military to restore
order and conceding to the ‘salary’ demands of the striking police, the
Fernandez government has been unable or unwilling to mobilize the democratic
electorate in defense of democracy. The democratic regime remains in power but
it is under siege and vulnerable to attack by domestic and imperial opponents.

Conclusion

Mass
revolts are two-edged swords: they can be a positive force when they occur
against military dictatorships like Pinochet or Mubarak, against authoritarian
absolutist monarchies like Saudi Arabia, a colonial-racist state like Israel,
and imperial occupations like against the US in Afghanistan. But they have to
be directed and controlled by popular local leaders seeking to restore
democratic majority rule.

History,
from ancient times to the present, teaches us that not all ‘mass revolts’
achieve, or are even motivated by, democratic objectives. Many have served
oligarchs seeking to overthrow democratic governments, totalitarian leaders
seeking to install fascist and pro-imperial regimes, demagogues and
authoritarians seeking to weaken shaky democratic regimes and militarists
seeking to start wars for imperial ambitions.

Today,
“mass revolts” against democracy have become standard operational procedure for
Western European and US rulers who seek to circumvent democratic procedures and
install pro-imperial clients. The practice of democracy is denigrated while the
mob is extolled in the imperial Western media. This is why armed Islamist
terrorists and mercenaries are called “rebels” in Syria and the mobs in the
streets of Kiev (Ukraine) attempting to forcibly depose a
democratically-elected government are labeled “pro-Western democrats”.

The
ideology informing the “mass revolts” varies from “anti-communist” and
“anti-authoritarian” in democratic Venezuela, to “pro-democracy” in Libya (even
as tribal bands and mercenaries slaughter whole communities), Egypt and the
Ukraine.

Imperial
strategists have systematized, codified and made operational “mass revolts” in
favor of oligarchic rule. International experts, consultants, demagogues and
NGO officials have carved out lucrative careers as they travel to ‘hot spots’
and organize ‘mass revolts’ dragging the target countries into deeper
‘colonization’ via European or US-centered ‘integration’. Most local leaders
and demagogues accept the double agenda: ‘protest today and submit to new
masters tomorrow’. The masses in the street are fooled and then sacrificed.
They believe in a ‘New Dawn’ of Western consumerism, higher paid jobs and
greater personal freedom … only to be disillusioned when their new rulers fill
the jails with opponents and many former protestors, raise prices, cut
salaries, privatize state companies, sell off the most lucrative firms to
foreigners and double the unemployment rate.

When
the oligarchs ‘stage-manage’ mass revolts and takeover the regime, the big
losers include the democratic electorate and most of the protestors. Leftists
and progressives, in the West or in exile, who had mindlessly supported the
‘mass revolts’ will publish their scholarly essays on ‘the revolution (sic)
betrayed” without admitting to their own betrayal of democratic principles.

If
and when the Ukraine enters into the European Union, the exuberant street
demonstrators will join the millions of jobless workers in Greece, Portugal,
and Spain, as well as millions of pensioners brutalized by “austerity programs”
imposed by their new rulers, the ‘Troika’ in Brussels. If these former
demonstrators take to the streets once more, in disillusionment at their
leaders’ “betrayal”, they can enjoy their ‘victory’ under the batons of “NATO
and European Union-trained police” while the Western mass media will have moved
elsewhere in support of ‘democracy’.

James
Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York,
owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless
and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author ofGlobalization
Unmasked(Zed Books).

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.